


After Life's Fitful Fever, He Sleeps Well

by HollowMachines



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Familial Tones, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Minor canon divergence, Platonic Relationships, Some Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Survivor Guilt, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:21:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26315617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HollowMachines/pseuds/HollowMachines
Summary: When Crozier meets her watchful gaze, his eyes must burn with a question—a desperate one as he curls his hand affectionately through Jopson’s hair again—but she only shakes her head slowly.There’s no helping him, now.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier & Thomas Jopson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	After Life's Fitful Fever, He Sleeps Well

**Author's Note:**

> So... it's a fix-it fic, but not really. 
> 
> Because I can handle death, but I can't handle despair.

He’s stopped hoping for survivors, though it's unclear if he'd ever expected any at all. 

_My men… we must find them._

The look in Lady Silence's eyes had said it all. There was nothing to find but the broken and tattered remnants of their existence, wretched bodies and hints of the society they’d abandoned, the society that they had forsaken for far off dreams and self-proclaimed noble pursuits.

The world has long since been kind to them, though perhaps that is what they've brought upon themselves, daring to tread so arrogantly in this land.

He’d buried James, and Sir John. He’d seen his officers mauled and defiled, men succumb to madness and illness and despair. He’d watched a dear friend hobble to his death with his head high in defiance, while others debased themselves and forsook their own humanity.

Jopson is just another lost soul, and seeing him now, sprawled across white stone in a barren frozen wasteland, Crozier is beyond emotion.

Where his hand rests upon a dead man, his fingers curl into fabric and his head drops between his shoulders. He won’t pray; it’s clear no one is listening, if they ever were at all. Goodsir had been right on that, as he was about so many things.

Perhaps, then, Crozier is bowing to the cruel hand of fate that has mercilessly struck them down.

A groan from under his hand. A twitch of muscle.

The swell in Crozier’s chest is indescribable as he watches the faint rise and fall of his back, feeling Jopson moving his head slightly under his hand.

“Captain…” Jopson wheezes harshly, fingers digging into the stones hard enough blood cracks through the skin.

It’s as if he’s been kicked in the stomach. 

Hurriedly he drops to his knees, ignoring the bite of stones and forgetting about the cold and the strain of his joints. With one careful hand and the support of his left arm he manages to roll Jopson onto his back, exposing the sickly, sunken features of his face, and bleak eyes that flinch at the light.

He wants to apologise for the painful stabbing of shale under his already destitute body, but he’s more occupied brushing limp strands of hair from Jopson’s forehead, wiping at the cold-dried sweat on his brow, wincing at the deathly grey of his skin. Settling a hand at his cheek, he tries not to flinch at the chill.

“Jopson,” Crozier smiles weakly, with false reassurance. “It’s alright, lad, I’ve got you.”

The grey of his eyes is somehow still so intense, contrasting against dark sockets, and Crozier can’t help but be rendered mute. There’s flickers of passing anger, then disbelief, then grief, even the hints of joy. It’s like Jopson, with his mind so addled by cold and sickness, can't decipher what it is he’s seeing.

“Captain… you came back.”

Confusion contorts his grizzled features, and Crozier shakes his head. 

Surprisingly Jopson manages to drag his arm up, and his hand slaps heavily onto his chest before weak fingers curl into the layers of Crozier's sleeve. There they hang limp, skin and bony knuckles a mixture of red inflammation and black decay.

”You left me, sir," Jopson rasps, a pinch to his brows like the words confound him. "You promised...”

 _They never told him,_ Crozier slumps defeated, eyes screwing shut in agony. _They left the sick behind, and they never even told the lad what had happened_.

Jopson was left to die thinking his captain had left him behind in the cruellest of fates. He'd been cast aside, left to drift in his final moments of loneliness knowing all he'd done, all he'd given of himself, had meant nothing. No freedom to choose his grave, or his company. Loyalty has no reward.

Had he not found him still clinging to life, Crozier never would have known. Perhaps that would have been a mercy on his heavy soul, to never know Jopson would die cursing his name, scorning his once-so-dearly-held captain.

“It wasn’t my intention,” Crozier manages, though it’s far from enough. “There was an incident… I wouldn’t have gone, had I known…”

He brushes a thumb across Jopson's frozen cheek, and the fingers around his forearm tremble desperately for grip. There's no time for explanations, and the words he needs to say stick like tar in his throat.

Even so, something in the haggard lines of Jopson’s face betray a sort of gladness, just a slight twitch of the mouth, a wrinkle around the eyes. Like he understands what it is Crozier is trying and failing to say.

The crew may have left him, but not Crozier, not his captain. Never that.

Playing at words that can’t possibly change anything. What’s done is done.

Raising his head with a frustrated sigh, Crozier blinks at the pressure behind his eyes, but no tears come. Perhaps it’s too cold, or perhaps he simply can’t anymore.

Silna watches him in silence; not that she can do anything else. But her expression, despite everything they’ve done, is mildly sympathetic. Maybe she remembers the man cradled in his arms; or at the very least, understands his importance.

When Crozier meets her watchful gaze, his eyes must burn with a question—a desperate one as he curls his hand affectionately through Jopson’s hair again—but she only shakes her head slowly.

_There’s no helping him, now._

"You're hand, sir. Are you—"

"Belay that, Jopson," Crozier hushes him, watching Jopson swallow hard around the rest of his struggling words.

Even in the fitful throes of death, he's perceptive as ever, never sparing an ounce of care for himself over others. Lesser men would turn selfish in such times. Not Jopson, with his rough edges and honest heart. He never lost himself to this place, not fully.

Crozier wishes, with bitterness churning his stomach, that Jopson was a lesser man. If only he was a man who would throw himself against the harshness of the world and shatter with it, rather than bend to it. He has never buckled, merely reforged.

It would hurt less watching him give up, rather than struggling on in futility.

Crozier settles himself down on the shale, shakily without the support of his left hand, but he manages well enough to his knees, fire protesting in his legs as he folds them under. It’s disturbingly easy to pull Jopson up, his fingers digging into sinew and bone. There’s so little of the man left, and what is left is pallid, bruised and scabbed. Clumsily he maneuvers Jopson up to settle in the crook of his left arm, allowing his head to flop weakly onto his shoulder.

Jopson makes no sounds aside from a few weak groans, his body one big needling pain. Once seated he tucks his own legs up, curling into himself in a fragile state so disturbingly unlike him that one could only wish it was a bad dream.

Crozier wipes through the dark, brittle hair that’s fallen into Jopson’s eyes with his good hand, mindful of the bloodied sores around the hairline. He keeps the stump of his left hand out of sight, tucked up against Jopson’s back. Harsh and feverish breathing hits Crozier’s skin, laboured like his chest is heaving against water.

Deeply ingrained self-consciousness has Crozier drawing his eyes up to the wasteland around them, but there are no more prying eyes to judge them here. Even Silna has settled herself down on the sledge with her back to them, in a silent solidary offer of privacy.

Some distant echo in his mind chants of improperness, but how long has it been since he's dismissed any notion of position? He left his propriety behind long ago, perhaps as far back as the ships, when his men were less honest of themselves and more highly held.

Jopson would likely have protested too, had he the mind, but he does not. His hands, plagued and skeletal, sit limp in his lap, curled with palms to the sky as if begging for death. Only the bodily tremors give any indication that he can still feel anything at all.

 _We are at the end of vanity_ , Fitzjames had said. Now he too was buried in this lonely land of snow. Again and again and again they fell...

Crozier holds him closer, like a parent would their child.

Jopson has been many things: a steward, an officer, a confidant. Though Crozier had never said it before—may never have even thought about it, least not in most companies—but Jopson was a friend; as best he could be one given their positions.

But in his youthfulness and candid appraisal and unabashed wit, Crozier had also come to see him like a son—perhaps even a sort of protégé in seafaring when he took an interest in the sciences—and in quiet moments of reflection or well-meaning banter, he’d wondered if Jopson had ever thought similarly.

How a man could bestow so much care and trust and confidence in someone like Francis Crozier, he doesn't know anymore. Though Jopson had known him for a good many years, with all that's transpired it's difficult to understand what he sees in this withered old captain. Crozier had never the heart to ask. It wouldn’t be proper.

Perhaps he’d feared the reality of the answer, too.

“Captain—”

“I’ve no ship to command,” Crozier says, perhaps a little too harshly to hide the strain on his heart. “I’ve no crew. I’m no longer your Captain.”

But Jopson only stares, his sunken eyes still so knowing and heartfelt. “Of course, sir.”

Surely if he were of clearer mind, he would weave some tale of leadership and loyalties as he has many times before. It almost makes Crozier angry to think Jopson would waste his last breaths upholding a failed captain rather than worrying for his own self. Such has always been his way.

”I did try, sir.” Jopson’s voice is pathetically weak, a sound like grating rust and fullness in his throat. It must be agony for him to speak. His eyes glitter with unshed tears.

Of course he tried. He tried to serve as best he could under his captain. He tried his best to lead as an officer, duties hastily thrust upon him in an ever worsening situation. He faced monsters and dissenters and argued acts of folly with courage and tenacity the likes of which Crozier had never fully considered him capable of before.

He only wishes now he'd taken the time to really know Jopson better as the man of many faces he has always been. How much has he kept locked behind his teeth all these years?

Only to have Crozier find him here, lying prone across the sharp stones with an arm outstretched.

Reaching, searching, beckoning. An image seared into his memory.

Whatever had transpired among the remaining men, Crozier can only speculate, but in that sight he'd seen abandonment and desperation.

The last thing Jopson had tried to do was follow. To _live_.

"Captain…"

“I know,” Crozier mutters into his forehead, his expression tight. “I know. You did well, lad. I’m proud.”

Were things different—were _Francis_ different—he would have said as such so many times before now. In fact, he should have a million words of praise and thanks for Jopson after all he’s done, after all they’ve been through, after everything Crozier has asked of him.

But he hasn’t the time. None of them ever did.

Crozier recalls when Jopson last spoke of his mother, back when it had been him tending to his sobering Captain and his fits of malady.

_How did she fair, when she was through it?_

Looking at him now, so near the end and cradled fondly in his arms, Crozier understands more than ever what brought that distant, haunted look to Jopson’s face.

There is no other side for him, just as there wasn’t for his mother.

This whole expedition, nothing but an exercise in futility; a lesson in helplessness in all its many forms.

“I’ve got you, Thomas,” he says anyways, an echo of their past, as if he can make the words mean something now.

Jopson manages a week, toothy smile at that.

”If you could, sir,” he groans, every breath a hard push for air. “I’d like to see the sun.”

There is no sun, only dismal clouds amidst a colourless curtain, like some cruel joke. 

But Crozier nods and allows Jopson’s head to loll against his shoulder until his vision is nothing but muted sky and hazy clouds grey as smoke. His eyes alight as best they can, his cracked lips tugging upwards like he’s truly seeing the world for the first time, with fresh eyes and long years ahead.

He watches the sky, and Crozier watches him, waiting for when it all ends, despising that for all his experience in sailing and sciences, he cannot save the man from this.

He couldn’t save any of them.

“I did not leave you.” The words force themselves free, desperate to be heard, understood.

Jopson makes a noise, somewhere between a cough and a sob, but when Crozier carefully cradles his head down into his shoulder, he sees the trembling of a smile pulling at peeling, blistered lips. Those eyes have drawn back to his face, threatening to forever haunt him.

“Do you hear me?” Crozier says more gently. “I did not leave you.”

 _You were not carelessly discarded_.

With a ragged inhale and the glint of tears in bloodshot eyes, Jopson says, barely above the wind, “Thank you, sir.”

It’s not his banter or his humour this time. Those words are genuine, pulled from the depths, as if it’s Jopson who has to thank his sordid old captain for everything, and not the other way around.

Crozier had asked him to be here; denied the steward they’d hired instead, and provided only one choice of crew, chosen Jopson; a familiar, trusted young hand from another voyage, another lifetime altogether. What had he thought, receiving that letter of employ only to find his captain turned sour and sodden?

“I led you to this,” he utters, jumping when Jopson wheezes and coughs as if needles are stuck in his chest. “You’ll have to forgive me for that.”

Jopson’s hands twitch like he wants to move them, but they get no farther than curling emaciated fingers into his palms. Hands that had once been nimble enough to sew buttons and seams, pour tea and handle fine glass decanters, combed and snipped and brushed and washed, give gentle care in times of need, and then curl confidently around a gun.

Hands that had reached out for a man he could not follow; utterly useless now.

Blood stains around Jopson's gums and teeth when his mouth opens again. “There’s nothing left to forgive, sir.”

Always so honest, magnanimous.

 _Be angry with me,_ Crozier wants to shout. _Despise me. Loathe me. All I have left are empty words._

He swore he'd leave no man alone; any of them, sick or no, no matter what they'd done. But Jopson had known he was ill, as did James, and Mr. Blanky. That imposter Hickey had already poisoned the well, laying plans and coercing vulnerable lost souls to his schemes.

Crozier had declared himself Atlas, carrying the weight of all these lives.

"I couldn't keep my promise in the end." The words are intended more for himself, but evidently Jopson is still listening.

“You can’t… save everyone, sir,” he utters, each breath a gasp, every word a tonne.

Well, he would know; perhaps it’s something he’s been told before, or worse, something he’s had to tell himself.

It does little to lighten Crozier’s dejection, when Jopson is just the latest evidence of his failings. He suspects he won’t be the last.

“I didn't save _anyone_.”

Again, damn him, Jopson somehow manages to smile. Crozier wishes he’d be angry, but it’s possible, in his dilapidated state of mind, that he simply can’t, anymore.

“You’re still alive, Captain.”

 _I don’t count._ A captain is responsible for his ship and her crew. What right does he have to outlive any of them?

Jopson will only protest, he will say Crozier's life is enough, he will pretend he isn't afraid, and that will torture Crozier forever because he will always know the truth.

Crozier is done making him waste what little energy he has on an old man’s self-pity and regret.

So they sit like that for a time, Jopson’s head resting gently in the crook of his arm, Crozier’s fingers brushing back dark locks of hair from his face absently. He tries not to pay mind to how the man’s breathing slows and labours, or how his body—once so wracked with shivers—has since ceased.

Jopson swallows hard, his eyes dimmed. “Tell me… about Antarctica… sir.”

He’s not long for this world, now.

Crozier detects the fear in his voice, watches the desperate twitch of his fingers trying to cling to earth's tethers. 

_Tell me of when we lived_.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Crozier grips tight around Jopson’s shoulder as if challenging death himself to wrest the man from him. Rocking back and forth subtly, he finds his voice again.

“Shall I tell you of the time I was forced to hop like a soused penguin across the ice flows as they drifted underfoot? Though I suppose you were there, so you know how that ends, too.”

Jopson smiles anyways. “Tell me again.”

It’s not a flight of angels singing him to his sleep, but it’s the best he can manage. Crozier begins his tale, and with every word Jopson sags, but his expression is calm, peaceful, almost content.

Crozier continues to talk until his voice is clogging in his throat and catching on cold dryness. Still he goes on, the words raking up from ragged lungs, and only when Jopson’s eyes have fallen shut and his body is without a hint of breath does Crozier finally feel a tear slip free.

No man is more deserving of rest, to be freed from the cruel clutches of the world. Crozier cradles him close a while longer, letting his story peter out, stolen off his tongue by the wind. One more tale ripped from his breath.

One more soul lost to a land of ice and a foolish dream.

**Author's Note:**

>  _After life's fitful fever he sleeps well,  
>  treason has done his worst;  
> nor steel, nor poison,  
> malice domestic, foreign levy,  
> nothing can touch him further_
> 
> \- Macbeth


End file.
